it happens for you, and you pay by how much you need. We also have a set of services that allow connectivity back to the enterprise and federation as part of the .NET services architecture. I don’t want to bore you with a feature list, but it’s quite extensive—if you go to www.microsoft.com/azure, it’s there.
X: So right now Windows Azure is a public cloud, comparable to other public clouds from providers like Amazon or Google or Rackspace or GoGrid. Could it also evolve into something enterprises could buy as the infrastructure for their private clouds?
YK: Going forward, we do believe there is a spectrum of technologies that customers want from us, all the way from traditional IT on-premises through virtualized IT through private clouds and all the way through public clouds. Today, Windows Azure is a Microsoft public cloud, administered by Microsoft and available to anybody. You will see us, in due course, move much of this technology and intermingle it with Windows Server technology, so that customers who want to rely on a public cloud can do that, and those who want a more dedicated version can have that. The branding of that will wait, but at PDC09 we articulated the vision. [For more, see this video of Khalidi’s keynote talk at the PDC, as well as a shared keynote speech by Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, and Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business.]
X: Right now, Azure is mainly a platform for developers who work in the Windows or .NET worlds, correct?
YK: It’s true. A key point is that we want to leverage the investments people have made in Windows, both in terms of expertise and code, and apply that to the cloud. More broadly, we want people to be able to write their applications and target the appropriate cloud depending on the business need. Technology-wise, it should be the same code, and the business would dictate where it is deployed—on a public cloud or a private cloud, in Asia or North America. That is the basic proposition here.
Unlike other cloud providers, we emphasize two things. The first is the need for applications to be cloud-ready to truly get the value of processing in the cloud and to be agile and low-cost. That’s why we use a model-driven way for applications to be described and managed by the infrastructure. The second is that we do automation. If you want to truly get low cost, you, as a developer or an IT professional, should not have to worry about patching your operating system or powering up virtual machines. Your application has to be described in a way that automation infrastructure can take care of it. From day one, we had this as a foundation, while others just talk about it.
X: Can you give an example?
YK: Right now, you can go to Azure.com and download the SDK [software development kit] and it comes with a plug-in for Visual Studio. If you fire that up and paste in your existing code and bump the application to the cloud, the core business logic is the same. The packaging is somewhat different, but once you put it in the right package and format, the right model, the rest is taken care of. If you want more capacity you can just say “I want more of this,” and we will fire it up. It’s delivered by the model.
X: What is the relationship between Windows Azure and the cloud-based business applications that Microsoft has announced, such as the online Software as a Service-based version of Office that’s coming in 2010?
YK: We already have a suite of applications in the online business, so that you as a customer, for example, can buy Exchange mailboxes. Those are offered as Software as a Service. The plan, basically, is for all of that technology plus other services at Microsoft to
